Every year, it seems like the media finds a new diet to tout -- along with the clinics that cater to the fad and customers who swear by the results. Fads in recent years include the South Beach Diet (choosing low-carbohydrate foods), the Atkins Diet (radically reducing carbohydrates), the baby food diet (replacing some meals with baby food) and the Master Cleanse (adopting a liquid diet comprised mainly of lemon or lime juice).

THE HCG DIET OVERVIEW

HCG is not another diet pill or another artificial appetite suppressant. HCG, or Human Chorionic Gonadotropin, is a natural water based hormone present in both men and women. It is however produced in great amounts in pregnant females. HCG acts like a key to unlock the entrance to the bodies stored fat reserves.

A British doctor named A.T.W Simeons discovered that HCG also enables the body to access all of the mother's stored fat supply and give the developing fetus a constant nutrient supply. This explains how pregnant women who are undernourished or who can't keep food down because of morning sickness still have healthy babies despite getting very little food. In the 1950s, Dr. Simeons discovered that HCG could shift the body into burning fat for fuel and allow the body to melt fat easily with a low calorie diet. That is the key to the HCG Diet developed by Dr. Simeons. HCG helps the body mobilize and burn its fat stores, no matter where they are stored -- and it worked that way in men and women, pregnant or not.

To understand why the HCG diet works so well (and why other diet methods nearly always fail), we have to know that there are different types of stored fat. One kind of fat --"good fat"-- is distributed throughout the body under the skin and between the internal organs. You don't need to reduce this fat, it's supposed to be there. It has many vital functions, including serving as an energy reserve in case the body doesn't get enough food. The body has a limited amount of "good fat" in reserve. If it gets depleted, you look and feel terrible and your body will try to replace it by making you feel hungry, so you'll eat!

There's another kind of fat, and this is what we all want to get rid of when it shows up. It's the beer belly, the padding on the butt, the love handles, the muffin top, the thunder thighs, and the double chin. This fat, as everyone knows, exists because the body needs a place to store the excess calories it isn't burning. What you may not know is that the body treats these deposits like a safe deposit box; they're in secure storage, not meant to be unlocked or used except as a last resort.

So the Catch-22 of dieting is that even though a person may have large amounts of excess fat, the body is not prepared to actually burn it. As far as your metabolism is concerned, the "good fat" is the only fat it can burn. If you don't consume the amount of calories your body needs (because you are dieting), your body will use the "good fat" as its first energy reserve. This is the reason why most diets fail. But the key reason to the HCG diet's success is that in anyone who isn't pregnant with a relatively small amount of HCG "resets" the fat metabolism and storage system. This is the same for both men and women. If you are not pregnant, the only thing the HCG can do is to unlock the body's fat stores - nothing more, nothing less - with no adverse affects.

HCG makes it possible to stick with the extremely low calorie diet described by the Simeon's protocol without extreme hunger. This is because HCG triggers the breakdown of stored body fat, releasing as much as 2000 calories per day into the bloodstream. Instead of depleting its essential reserves, the body is meeting its energy needs by burning off the excess fat you want to get rid of. Thanks to the HCG's "reset" effect on the body's regulation of fat storage, you can lose between 1-2 pounds a day on a very low calorie diet without suffering fatigue or extreme hunger and return to normal healthy eating afterward without gaining the weight back